ABSTRACT The article focuses on selected elements
of the image of Spain created in Polish reportage texts in the recent years. The analytical material comprises three extensive on-fiction texts published as books: Pył z landrynek. Hiszpańskie feisty [Dust of Hard Candies. Spanish Fiestas] (2013) by Katarzyna Kobylarczyk, Barcelona stolica Polski [Barcelona, the Capital of Poland] (2016) by Ewa Wysocka, and Ludzie z Placu Słońca [People from the Square of the Sun] (2017) by Aleksandra Lipczak. The undertaken analysis of imaging strategies will be limited to three fields of interpretation concerning 1) modernization processes in Spain in the recent years 2) pragmatics and instrumentalization of Spanish memory cultures 3) Spanish culture of events and searching for sacrum in laicized modern times. The article will scrutinize how cultural travel may become an intellectual inspiration and an inspiration to develop one’s writing style in such non-fiction texts as reportage and travel guidebook.
KEYWORDS: non-fiction, cultural tourism, cultural memory,
Spain, Polish literature
ABSTRAKT
Przedmiotem uwagi są wybrane elementy wizerunku Hiszpanii zapisanego w polskich tekstach reportażowych lat ostatnich. Materiałem analitycznym są trzy obszerne teksty non fiction opublikowane w formie książek: Katarzyna Kobylarczyk (Pył z landrynek. Hiszpańskie fiesty, 2013); Ewa Wysocka (Barcelona stolica Polski, 2016); Aleksandra Lipczak (Ludzie z Placu Słońca, 2017). Analizę strategii wizerunkowych ograniczymy do trzech pól interpretacyjnych dotyczących: 1) procesów modernizacyjnych Hiszpanii lat ostatnich; 2) pragmatyki i instrumentalizacji hiszpańskich kultur pamięci; 3) hiszpańskiej kultury eventów i poszukiwania sacrum w zlaicyzowanych czasach współczesnych. W artykule rozpatruje się, w jaki sposób podróż kulturowa może stać się inspiracją warsztatową i intelektualną dla takich tekstów non fiction jak reportaż i travel guidebook.
SŁOWA KLUCZOWE:
non fiction, reportaż, guidebook, turystyka kulturowa, pamięć kulturowa, Hiszpania, literatura polska
Joanna Szydłowska
University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn
Three strategies of conceptualizing
Spain in Polish 21st-century reportage.
Modernization – memorization – myth
Trzy strategie konceptualizacji wizerunku Hiszpanii
w reportażach polskich XXI wieku.
Modernizacja – memoryzacja – mit
INTRODUCTION
It is the aim of the proposed reflection to describe selected elements of Spain’s im-age in Polish reportim-ages published in the last five years. The focus will be placed on explorations which can be perceived as cultural journeys focused on intellec-tual and aesthetic contemplation of various (material and non-material) artefacts of culture. It will be scrutinized which elements of the symbolic imaginarium con-tribute to the reportage image of Spain in the Polish non-fiction literature of the recent years. Additionally, it will be investigated how modern Polish literary re-portage employs genre alterations of travel guidebook.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Postmodernity blurred the sharpness of national categories in designing the modern world and triggered an offensive of identity projects based on existential values and the idea of citizenship. The shattering of the homogenous image of Poles’ collective identity that occurred after 1989 strengthened the figure of the Other. In the Polish reality, the Other has always been associated particularly will-ingly with a German, Russian, Jew or Ukrainian. These figures of otherness have always been particularly strongly present in the Polish public discourse and in texts of culture. They have triggered debates, aroused emotions, redefined the as-sessment of the Polish present and past. Naturally, the subject of Spain has never stood a chance of causing such an interest and emotions. The Spanish Other has always been too far away, remaining peripheral and unknown. It has been diffi-cult to see oneself in his mirror. The diary of literary and media facts confirms that for Poles Spain has remained a country rather poorly recognized. Magdalena Barbaruk proved that this fact has a wider European context: “does Spain play a role of the European place of »non-memory«? Is this a consequence of mar-ginalizing Spain because of Francoist regime? Is Spain bound to be a peripheral country owing to its geographical location? Is it to be overlooked because of the civilizational and cultural gap, because of its »Africanity«?”1. Yet it is the Spain
overwhelmed by civil war that became a subject of one of the most valuable Polish
reportage books in the interwar period (Ksawery Pruszyński)2 and a number of
other known reports (Jędrzej Giertych; Roman Fajans; Jerzy Przedwieczerski)3.
After World War II, Spain was brought closer to the Polish reader in a travel di-ary of Monika Warneńska4 and literary essays by Maria Kuncewiczowa5. When
the Iron Curtain collapsed and Poland joined the Schengen Area, Spain became an attractive tourist destination, an object of cultural and linguistic fascinations. Late modernity, which inscribed the man into a multidimensional and unstable world, manifested itself, among others, in a boom of self-help booksphilosophy, an increase in the importance of all sorts of advisors, experts, and consultants6.
These transformations – multiplied by a change in patterns of international tour-ism and a new figure of tourist-traveler7 – found their reflection in an incredibly
wide offer of guidebooks and Baedekers, which literally flooded the Polish pub-lishing market in the recent years8. These texts, fundamental for a tourist
experi-ence, interestingly contextualise themselves in relation to the narration of profes-sional branding materials – those which build the image, reputation and brand of a given country9.
This type of utilitarian literature has a great power of distributing and repro-ducing image stereotypes. A stereotype, according to Walter Lippmann, is always a product of individual, fragmentary, schematic and simplified perceptions of a given
2 K. Pruszyński, W czerwonej Hiszpanii, Warszawa 1937.
3 J. Giertych, Hiszpanja bohaterska. Warszawa 1937; R. Fajans, Hiszpania 1936. Z wrażeń
korespondenta wojennego, in: M. Szczygieł (ed.), 100/XX. Antologia polskiego reportażu XX wie-ku, Volume 1, Wołowiec 2014; J. Przewieczerski, Hiszpania w ogniu: reportaż z 22 rycinami, Warszawa 1936.
4 M. Warneńska, Zwierciadło z Toledo, Warszawa 1985. 5 M. Kuncewiczowa, Don Kichot i niańki, Lublin 1990.
6 A. Giddens, Nowoczesność i tożsamość. „Ja” i społeczeństwo w epoce późnej
nowoczesno-ści, A. Szulżycka (tr.), Warszawa 2012.
7 J. Urry, Socjologia mobilności, J. Stawiński (tr.), Warszawa 2009; Z. Bauman,
Ponowocze-sność jako źródło cierpień, Warszawa 2013.
8 K. Wolnik-Vera, Przystanek Barcelona, Warszawa 2014; K. Wolnik-Vera, Z. Siewak-Sojka,
Costa del Sol i Costa de la Luz, Bielsko-Biała 2018; M. Bernatowicz, Hiszpania. Fiesta dobra na wszystko, Warszawa 2017; M. L. Graff, Spokojnie, to tylko Hiszpania. Przewodnik po różnicach kulturowych, J. Zabrodzka, P. Wciślik (tr.) Warszawa 2007; M. Olechowska, G. Chołopiak, Hisz-pania jakiej nie znacie. Kastylia – la Mancha. W krainie błędnych rycerzy i wiatraków, Brzezia Łąka 2013.
9 M. Hereźniak, Marka narodowa: jak skutecznie budować wizerunek i reputację kraju, Warszawa 2011.
topic, shared by a certain group of people10. Stereotypical perceptions of other
na-tions are part of a given national culture and confirm that an individual sharing them belongs to a given national community. These perceptions are crucial for assess-ing and positionassess-ing groups of others (heterostereotypes), as well as for developassess-ing views about one’s own national, ethnic, or cultural group (autostereotypes). In Pol-ish non-fiction literature, the image of Spain is built on the basis of a few constant topoi. Canonically, Spain is associated with sunny beaches and love-related thrills, colorful local culture and impressive cultural heritage, as well as captivating histo-ry11. Among these associations, an important place is occupied by topoi which are
fundamental for the European civilizations, that is holy places, willingly described in traveljournals, diaries, essays and reportages of varying cognitive and literary value12. It is still strongly believed that Spain is an ecstatic and sensual space, a
land-scape of extremities and opposites, a Catalan tandem of seny [common sense] and
rauxa [sudden determination or action]13. A more sophisticated recipient will look in
these texts for longing for the preindustrial Spanish landscape, with its civilizational disparity of the world separated from the rest of Europe spiritually and culturally, longing for the colonial grandeur of the empire, longing for interlacing ingredients of the Arabic, Jewish and Christian past, which was so brilliantly recorded in the prose of Norman Lewis14 and Cees Nooteboom15, available for Poles in translation.
MATERIALS
After World War II, Spanish readers were gradually getting acquainted with the oeuvre of Polish literature16, yet the figure who was the greatest ambassador of
10 M. Grzesiak-Feldman, Tożsamościowe uwarunkowania posługiwania się stereotypami, Warszawa 2006.
11 A. K. Majewska, Rok na Majorce, Kraków 2013; A. Sarzyńska, Barszalona, Kraków 2017. 12 D. Fórmanowicz, Mężczyzna w chwili, gdy zostaje sam, Warszawa 2016; M. Wiernikow-ska, Oczy czarne, oczy niebieskie. Z drogi do Santiago de Compostela, Warszawa 2013; J. Gać, El Camino, czyli hiszpańskie wędrowanie, Pelplin 2013.
13 B. Dudko (ed.), Podróże z Kapuścińskim. Opowieści trzynastu tłumaczy, Kraków 2007, p. 124.
14 N. Lewis, Voices of the Old Sea, London 1984; idem, The Tomb In Seville, London 2003. 15 C. Nooteboom, Roads to Santiago: A Modern-Day Pilgrimage Through Spain, London 1997. 16 I. Narębska, P. Sawicki; Panorama histórico de las traducciones de la literatura Polaca
publicadas en España de 1939 a 1975. Tesis doctoral. Universidad de Alicante Facultad de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Traducción e Interpretación, Alicante 2011.
Polish literature in the Spanish-speaking world was Ryszard Kapuściński, whose works were congenially translated into Spanish and Catalan by, among others, Agata Orzeszek, Jerzy Sławomirski and Ann Rubió17. Kapuściński’s work, which
functioned as a model for a whole generation of journalists, received wide sci-entific reflection, and the author himself became a hero of mass imagination ow-ing to the film Jeszcze dzień życia (Another Day of Life) by Raul de la Fuente and Damian Nenow. The present article refers to Kapuściński’s successors. The ana-lytical corpus compiled for the purpose of this study is comprised of three report-age books devoted to Spain which were published in the years 2013-2017. These are: Pył z landrynek. Hiszpańskie fiesty (2013) by Katarzyna Kobylarczyk,
Barce-lona stolica Polski (2016) by Ewa Wysocka, and Ludzie z Placu Słońca (2017) by
Aleksandra Lipczak18. Their authors represent the middle (Wysocka was born in
1965) and young generation (Kobylarczyk – 1980; Lipczak – 1981). The Master and his disciples differ not only in gender and generation, but primarily because of their writing styles and the range of the undertaken reportage activities. Al-though neither of the female authors can be seen as representing the same kind of individuality Master Kapu did, nor are they counted among “the hottest” re-portage authors in Poland nowadays, it can be assumed that the presented texts are interesting analytical material due to at least three reasons: 1) they document (although in microscale) the directions of the development of the modern Pol-ish reportage; 2) they show the pragmatics of cultural travel as a cognitive and writing experience of non-fiction authors; 3) they go beyond stereotypical rep-resentations of the image of Spain in Polish texts. The repertoire of the selected texts was profiled to show possibly most diverse, alternative, nonstandard per-spectives on the issues discussed in the present study. The proposed analytical corpus is arbitrary, it does not exacerbate all possible interpretations of Spanish experiences in the modern non-fiction literature and has been embraced only for the purpose of this study.
17 H. Stochniałek, En busca de las normas de traducción: la prosa polaca traducida en
Es-paña y en México: estudio del caso, rozprawa doktorska, Uniwersytet Warszawski 2005, Saar-brücken 2012.
18 K. Kobylarczyk, Pył z landrynek. Hiszpańskie fiesty, Wołowiec 2013; A. Lipczak, Ludzie
METHODS
The character of the undertaken study is interdisciplinary. From the perspective of media sciences, its methodological basis consists in qualitative research, es-pecially content analysis, understood as “all systematic procedures whose aim is to examine the content of reported information”19. The applied methods will
also include literary and historical studies methodology, which will make it pos-sible to describe the morphology of text, yet also provide a chance of referring to extratextual senses, such as historical, social and cultural contexts20. This will
be especially fruitful when it comes to the issue of memory. The 20th century is a period of a fight for memory, a period when memory discourse flourished, when history of the second degree triumphed, i.e. the remembered history dominated over the event history21; it is also a period of distrust towards grand narratives
and a period of openness to microhistory22. New memorization projects were
concluded with original narrative concepts, a greater status of diaries, autobiog-raphies and reportages. It is visible that all this was really sense-generating when one invokes reportages of Svetlana Alexievich – a Nobel Prize laureate (2015) in literature, which she received for a reportage. The end of the 20th century, in line with reorientation of the geopolitical map of Central Europe, triggered a chain of undertakings oriented towards recording collective identities of communities with a new matrix of memory. In the Polish reality, it became rudimentary to de-velop a language to write about expulsion of Germans from areas taken over by Poland in 1945, about the Holocaust of Polish Jews, about moral and ideologi-cal heritage of communism. In the Iberian Peninsula, communicative memory (functioning within one generation) and cultural memory (across generations,
19 R. D. Wimmer, J. R. Dominick, Mass media. Metody badań. T. Korłowicz (tr.), Kraków 2008, p. 211.
20 A. Kaliszewski, E. Żyrek-Horodyska, Kilka uwag o metodach analizy tekstów
dziennikar-skich ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem reportażu, in: A. Szymańska, M. Szymańska-Magdziarz, A. Hess, (ed.), Metody badań medioznawczych i ich zastosowanie, Kraków 2018, p. 116.
21 P. Nora, Les lieux de memoire, Paris 1997.
22 A. Assmann, Cultural memory and western civilization: functions, media, archives, Cam-bridge 2011; P. Ricoeur, Pamięć, historia, zapomnienie, J. Margański (tr.), Kraków 2006; R. Tra-ba, Historia – przestrzeń dialogu, Warszawa 2006; E. Domańska, Mikrohistorie – spotkania w międzyświatach, Poznań 2005.
exceeding the horizon of experience, recorded in texts, places, figures and myths) struggled with, among others, challenges of the colonial past and fresh heritage of enslavement.
The presented reflection will take into consideration the methodology of cultural tourism – a young discipline situated in the field of social and economic sciences, humanities and Earth science23. The subject of research in cultural
tour-ism comprises travelling to objects and places of culture as well as participating in cultural events (high and popular culture), thanks to which people who travel encounter products of culture. This leads to broadening their knowledge about the world of man, and the presence of culture-related content is decisive when it comes to them deciding to participate in this form of travelling24. Today, no
one questions the conclusion that the tourist experience has become egalitarian and trivialized25. Postmodernity transformed otherness and mystery into tourist
attractiveness of a given place, it changed “the landscape of initiation not even into a kind of thematic park, but into a space of sensation, dominated by sensual experience”26. Tourist industry keeps generating new areas of expansion. Great
capital has been invested in cultural heritage, religious ethnic, event, Erasmus and volunteer tourism, as well as alternative and extreme tourism27. Postmodernist
tourists have at their disposal modern distribution channels and useful gadgets: geo-guidebooks and audiovisualisations, interactive maps, QR codes, holograms, applications, social media services, WWW pages, blogs28 as well as interactive
outdoorgames, such asquesting, geocaching, and orienteering29. New
destina-tions, experiences, narratives and their heroes are being born as we speak30.
23 A. Mikos von Rohrscheidt, Turystyka kulturowa. Fenomen, potencjał, perspektywy, Po-znań 2010.
24 Ibid.
25 D. MacCanell, Tourist: a new theory of the leisure class, New York 1989.
26 K. Łukasiewicz Krzysztof, I. Topp, Przewodniki w kulturze i kultura jako przewodnik, „Prace Kulturoznawcze” nr 17 (2015), p. 10.
27 K. Buczkowska, Turystyka kulturowa. Przewodnik metodyczny, Poznań 2008.
28 A. Stasiak, B. Włodarczyk, J. Śledzińska, Wczoraj, dziś i jutro krajoznawstwa, in: A. Sta-siak, B. Włodarczyk, J. Śledzińska (ed.), Współczesne oblicze krajoznawstwa, Warszawa 2016; M. Jerczyńska, Gospodarka elektroniczna w sektorze turystyki, „Logistyka” nr 2 (2006), p. 65–66.
29 M. Zamelska, B. Kaczor, Interaktywne formy współczesnego krajoznawstwa na
przykła-dzie Wielkopolski, in: A. Stasiak, B. Włodarczyk, J. Śledzińska (ed.), Współczesne oblicze krajo-znawstwa, Warszawa 2016, p. 315–328.
Baedekers and reportages are attractive analytical materials for those who investigate cultural tourism. These genres developed their modern formula as late as the 20th century, yet their sources expressing the imperative of travelling go back to the Greek perégiesis and the Roman itinerarium31, medieval
peregrina-tions and merchants’ accounts, renaissance reports of diplomats and scientists, and soon also diaries of those travelling to new lands32, grand toursand reports
of peregrinations of Romantics33. A classical Baedeker is focused on
present-ing a particular geographical-cultural location, portraypresent-ing the world selectively (when it comes to topics, objects, events, routes, maps). It gives tips as to how to recognize the space around, it inscribes the present into the cultural heritage (creating a cultural landscape). Moreover, it writes scripts telling tourists how to experience the reality, while when it comes to communication strategies, it imi-tates a situation of “a shared walk”34.
Linguists and media researchers unanimously claim that breaking the mo-nopoly of verbal culture by the multimedia came as a conclusion to attempts at producing a linguistic definition of text, which proved unsuccessful. Genealogi-cal reflection is what should follow the consequences of the communicative arena transformation as well as texts which employ various media and semiotic sys-tems. Written in a new communicative reality, reportage attempts at meeting new challenges. Already Kapuściński, looking for new epistemological perspec-tives, experimented with essay, collage, poetry, photography, as well as explor-ing potentials of anthropological narration, and sharexplor-ing his views as an expert35.
Kapuściński’s writing inspired the genre of reportage when it comes to cognitive achievements of Annales School (promoting “soft” facts) and The New Journal-ism School (essayization and anthropologization of narration, fascination with magical journalism). Today, non-fiction prose is more and more often treated
31 J. Sznayder, Podróże w starożytności, Warszawa 1959.
32 A. Mączak, Peregrynacje. Wojaże. Turystyka, Warszawa 1984; H. Dziechcińska, O
staro-polskich dziennikach podróży, Warszawa 1991.
33 J. Kamionka-Straszakowa, Zbłąkany wędrowiec. Z dziejów romantycznej topiki, Wrocław 1992.
34 Z. Rybczyńska, Potęga i niemoc spojrzenia Meduzy: alternatywne przewodniki miejskie
jako realizacja nowej utopii, „Prace Kulturoznawcze” nr XVII (2015), p. 129–141.
35 A. Kunce, Antropologia punktów. Katowice 2008; A. Kamińska, Europejczyk w podróży:
odmienność i tożsamość jako kategorie opisu świata w reportażowej twórczości Ryszarda Kapu-ścińskiego, Białystok 2017.
as a form of textualizing experience equal to fiction36. Academic studies propose
resigning from the genealogical perspective, and shifting interests towards ana-lyzing thematic blocks independently of generic their provenience. Reportage is more openly claimed to be a certain communicative license, a multimedia genre. Krzysztof Stępnik37 writes about silvic perspectives on reportage; Edward
Balcer-zan38 proposes a systematics of quasi-generic paradigms; Tomasz Goban-Klas39
and Paweł Zajas40 claim that the juxtaposition of fiction vs. non-fiction is not true.
In 2010, serious debates on journalists’ ethics were inspired by a book of Artur Domosławski, which was interpreted as an attack on the authority of Master Kapuściński, or alternatively as a Promethean gesture of freeing oneself from the debate on writer’s workshop41.
ANALYSIS
Challenges of modernization, or what we learn from Spanish experience: Aleksandra Lipczak
Aleksandra Lipczak’s reportage narration has been influenced by the greatest. The author fell in love with Spain because of Vengo, a film by Tony Gatlif. She collected her material thanks to a scholarship awarded by Ryszard Kapuściński Herodot Foundation, and she prepared the text inspired by Mariusz Szczygieł, one of the best Polish reporters of the middle generation. As a result, her work was shortlisted for Witold Gombrowicz Award. Publishing in the most important Pol-ish opinion weeklies and having lived in Spain for six years, Lipczak says:
36 G. Grochowski, Pytania o niefikcjonalną prozę dyskursywną, in: M. Czermińska (ed.),
Po-lonistyka w przebudowie, Kraków 2005, p. 650–665.
37 K. Stępnik, Dekonstrukcja reportażu. (Zygmunta Nowakowskiego „Niemcy a la
mi-nute…”), in: M. Woźniakiewicz-Dziadosz (ed.), Fabularność i dekonstrukcja, Lublin 1998, p. 165–166.
38 E. Balcerzan, W stronę genologii multimedialnej, in: W. Bolecki, I. Opacki (ed.),
Genolo-gia dzisiaj, Warszawa 2000, p. 97.
39 T. Goban-Klas, Świat Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego, in: K. Wolny-Zmorzyński, W. Furman, J. Snopek (ed.), Mistrzowie literatury czy dziennikarstwa?, Warszawa 2011, p. 120.
40 K. Zajas, Zagubieni kosmonauci. Raz jeszcze o “Imperium” Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego
i jego krytykach, „Teksty Drugie” nr 3 (2010), p. 218–231.
41 G. Wołowiec, O Domosławskim i jego krytykach, „Teksty Drugie” nr 1–2 (2011), p. 279–288.
Spain which I got to know was the most fashionable and the sexiest country in Eu-rope. It was rushing ahead, imposing trends. I got to know it like that, and I got to know it from a completely different perspective in 2008, when everything started collapsing there (…). All sorts of overlooked issues started coming to the surface, all things not dealt with previously, all the matters that had been slighted before, when the country had been stunned by its progress. Now, all these things were impossible to ignore. When I started writing my book, I treated Spain like an older sister of Po-land, somehow battered by life, whose mistakes offered some reflection for us42.
Aleksandra Lipczak shares the opinions of her masters, Ryszard Kapuściński and Artur Domosławski, who perceived the reality of the Spanish-speaking Lat-in America as “laboratories of a new century,” where phenomena important for the world had been born43. Lipczak inscribes this relation into the Polish context.
Ludzie z Placu Słońca is a memento of sorts for the country at the Vistula River,
and even more than that – a seismograph of social, economic, and cultural trans-formations in the 21st-century Europe. This would be a certain variation on the metaphor of “a mirror from Toledo” established by Monika Warneńska (1985) in her reportage book focused on memories. Forgotten today, this book encom-passes a collection of ideological falsehoods disseminated in Poland after the Yalta Conference about the Spanish civil war and related to the dogmatization of the image of the Spanish confrontation with Fascism44. Diachronically read,
non-fiction texts show how unstable the interpretation line of these experiences is. Warneńska, a journalist related to the socialist authorities, assesses the Solidarity surge of August 1980 very negatively. Supporting the oppressive gesture of Gen-eral Wojciech Jaruzelski, who introduced the Martial Law on 13 December 1981, she saw the budding democratic movement in Poland as a shadow of Spanish Fa-lange and a fifth column, “which served foreign empires, foreign interests, and was the bane of the country”45. A totally different image is shown in the Spanish
“mirror” of the reporters of the younger generation. Lipczak, and Wysocka, who
42 Wierzę w empatyczną Hiszpanię. With A. Lipczak talking M. Majewska, „Krytyka Polityc-zna”, 23.09.2017, https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/aleksandra-lipczak-hiszpania-reportaz-wywiad/ (access: 01.03.2020).
43 W. Bereś, K. Burnetko (ed.), Nie ogarniam świata: z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim, Warsza-wa 2007.
44 J. Kieniewicz, Hiszpania w zwierciadle polskim, Gdańsk 2001. 45 M. Warneńska, op. cit., p. 333.
will be mentioned later – declaring their faith in human freedom and democracy – focused on a different symmetry in the histories of Poland and Spain, that is op-pressiveness of a regime violating rights of an individual. With her social and po-litical temper, Lipczak, who specializes in the theme of migration, watches Spain of the transformation in the first decade of the 21st century. Analogies between Polish and Spanish experience which interest her appear at the political level (the authoritarian past, transformation drawing “a thick line” to cut off the past, “com-ing back to Europe” concept), mental and axiological level (Catholicism), as well as economic level (the crisis of the beginning of the 21st century).
“A Spanish fad” is what Lipczak calls her book46, having in mind its stylistic
polymorphism. Reportage hybrids sketched with the technique of patchwork ex-press the Spanish aesthetics and are adequate to the way problems are formu-lated in the text. Each of the reportages collected in the volume shows a different technique of working with facts and the text itself. The traditional first-person narrative is complemented with objectified historical sketches, forms of investi-gative journalism, meticulously structured collages, reportage portraits, and in-terviews. Agnieszka Warnke compared the nuances of generic variations of Lipc-zak’s reportages to Spanish dances.
The collection includes reportages whose voice reminds one of flamenco. Although it does not tell a story, body movements and gestures express emotions. They show a special magnetizing energy. The same sensitivity, passion, depth and rhythm is there in Ludzie z Placu Słońca. For instance, a story about looking for the signs of the dead who “disappeared” during the war is like soleá – brimming with melan-choly, materializing loneliness and pain of losing a loved one. It requires focus, al-though the slow pace sometimes quickens. In turn, alegrías means joy, beauty of human relationships, and such a positive ambience describes “Zwyczajna wieś” [An Ordinary Village].A bitter-sweet answer to the question “Co można zrobić (z) Franco w dwudziestym pierwszym wieku?” [What can be done with/to Franco in the 21st century?] is exuberant, just like bulerías, which must be danced at every fiesta47.
46 Historia, reportaż. With A. Lipczak talking M. Wilk, #rozmowyliczanki [ep. 38], 18.12.2017, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lipczak+rozmowyliczanki (ac-cess: 12.03.2020).
47 A. Warnke, Aleksandra Lipczak, Ludzie z Placu Słońca, 20.05.2017, https://culture.pl/ pl/dzielo/aleksandra-lipczak-ludzie-z-placu-slonca, (access: 09.03.2020).
Comparing Lipczak’s book to a reportage volume which gained acclaim in Poland some time ago, namely Samotność Portugalczyka [Loneliness of a Portuguese]48, it needs emphasizing that her way of presenting the story is more
capricious and associative. What is common for both narratives is a truly emphat-ic portrayal of longing for the imperial past. Struggling with postcolonial qualms, confronted with the challenges of globalizing societies and visions of a still in-creasing wave of immigration, works as a pretext to sketch a collective portrait of the presented communities, with the spotlight on depicting their emotions, pas-sions and spirit.
Lipczak’s quasi guidebook is rebellious in its nature. It leads off the beaten track, into places which are not obvious. The meandering narration may lead the reader astray. That is why it was necessary to introduce sections to make par-ticular parts cohesive and organized, to build hierarchy and chronology of the presented episodes. Working as preludes, interjections and punchlines, they are often commentaries – grotesque, ironic, dramatic. In its compositional aspect,
Ludzie z Placu Słońca reminds one of Mariusz Szczygieł’s reportage technique.
Lipczak is aware of her material, she plays an intelligent game with the reader, betraying the conventionality of the creative act. There is not one Spain and there is not one narration, which is impressively documented with a compositionally interesting reportage titled “Populacja tygrysa bengalskiego” [Population of the Bengal Tiger], which is based on the magic of numbers. Defining the aims of her book, Lipczak references the formula of reportage guidebook. “I wanted to make it a reportage guidebook to modern Spain, a book which would allow the reader to understand and get to know it at least a bit. This is a book which replaces folklore with stories about a country made of flesh and blood”49. The formula of
Baedeker will come to the surface also as an element of the intertextual layer of the text, among others, in quotations from a guidebook prepared by Barcelona en Comú.
48 I. Klementowska, Samotność Portugalczyka, Wołowiec 2014.
49 W Hiszpanii wszystko jest bardziej. With A. Lipczak talking M. Bojanowska, K.
Choj-nacka, „Nowy Folder” 03.05.2017, http://nowyfolder.com/aleksandra-lipczak-w-hiszpanii-wszystko-jest-bardziej/ (access: 11.03.2020).
Lipczak avoided image stereotypes of a sunny
country. There is no Sun, Sand, Sea landschaft,
there are no sweaty tourists in Park Güell, crowded
beaches and fashionable restaurants. There are no
aesthetics of exaggeration as if taken out of Pedro
Almodovar’s films, gloomy air of Carlos Saura’s
films, or metaphysics, which has been inscribed
into Ibero-American literature. Lipczak made the
image more complex, introducing, among others,
the context of “European Orient,” a laboratory of
European migrant experiences, unresolved traumas
from the European past, the effectiveness of
antiestablishment movements, debates on the role of
gender. These elements of the cognitive layer should
be seen as valuable: they universalize the message
of the reportage and inscribe the text into the
European context.
The texts of Spanish culture come to life in the ways of imaging, comparing and introducing metaphors. Neo-ruins – poignant mementos of pre-crisis aggran-dizement – remind the author of surrealist projects of Salvador Dali and Luis Bu-nuel. Don Quixote appears in order to fight modern specters of “cities with no people, roads with no cars, zebra crossings with no pedestrians, airports with no passengers”50. The language of stylistic excess or dry report, the mannerism of
enumeration, and street art rhetoric all express the aberration potential of places and spaces during an economic crisis, demonstrating how art becomes part of the social climate of the 21st-century Spain. For the purpose of her reportage, Lipc-zak skillfully adapts the language of the street, media slogans, whispers of family secrets and expert jargon, powerful authenticity of newspaper adds, intimacy of prayer-like letters of intent, rhetoric of soulless official letters. She compiles them into a flexible material to express the Spanish experience.
For Tim Ederson51, tourism is a performative act – creating and recreating
meanings and values. Such an understanding can be applied to a reportage ex-perience: participating in an incident and creating a textual fact. The variety of sources to be found in the concluding section of the book is truly impressive. Lip-czak absorbs the atmosphere of a huge crowd of a street demonstration, listens to confessional narratives of people affected by the crisis, debates with visitors of the mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen, reads art present in the public space, in Melilla looks at the life at the southern border of Europe, talks to anthropolo-gists exhuming the remains from the period of the civil war, undoubtedly having in mind analogous images from the Bosnian reportage book by Wojciech Toch-man (Jakbyś kamień jadła) or his recent publication devoted to Cambodia (Pianie
kogutów, płacz psów)52.
Three modules contribute to the cognitive structure of Aleksandra Lipczak’s volume. These are:
Modernizing and emancipatory discourse
Modernizing and emancipatory discourse reports transformations of the tradi-tionally patriarchal Spanish society and relationships of the genders. The author describes the way which Spanish society travelled from machismo to the time when feminist, LGBT+ and transgression movements came into the picture of public narration in the 1980s. She looked for the senses of ideological revolution initiated by Josѐ Luis Rodriguez Zapatero at the emancipated streets of Madrid, provocations of Almodovar’s avantgarde films and in the silence of provincial Spain, where people of the same gender can get married. On the margins of de-bates concerning sexuality, a treaty on plurality, freedom and human rights was built. “Not sex, but indeed democracy. Not orientation, but participation”53 – she
writes. The author created fascinating portraits of strong and charismatic wom-en: Pilar Primo de Rivera, and Ada Colau. These portrait reportages, which can be compared to the best models of world reportage, are at the same time huge frescos documenting the social-cultural and political background, boldly reaching
51 T. Edensor, Performing tourism, staging tourism: (re)producing tourist space and
practi-ce, „Tourist Studies” nr 1 (2001), p. 59–81.
52 E. Tochman, Jakbyś kamień jadła, Wołowiec 2002; idem, Pianie kogutów, płacz psów, Wołowiec 2019.
for tools of sociological, psychological and cultural analysis. If one assumes, as Jacques Lacan did54, that language which we inherited is masculine and
express-es the structure of patriarchy, Lipczak’s prose is herstory, a contrnarrative when compared with the androcentric perspective.
Civic discourse
The subject of civic discourse in Lipczak’s narration concerns the habitus of pre-carians and stateless people, whom the author watches in Barceloneta and Melilla. These are the figures of “people-rubbish”, “people-waste”, unwanted products of globalization55. Their isolation at the margins (in refugee camps), the ambivalent
status of their subjugation to the law, and at the same time excluding them from the law, make them model icons of homo sacer56. Lipczak’s social, activist temper
tells her to watch admiringly how the civic public space of cities affected by reces-sion is being built and how a neoliberal model of city space is being experimented with in Barcelona. She is fascinated with the phenomenon of antisystem civic ven-tures as a reaction to compromised rhetoric of consumption (Plataforma de Afec-tados por la Hipoteca (PAH) [Platform for People Affected by Mortgages]). What deserves special attention is a dynamically sketched portrayal of a Barcelonian district El Raval, together with its unique geography, aesthetics and ethics, moral-ity and customs, linguistic polymorphism, multiculturalism, original portraits of its citizens, and in a wider perspective – frescoes on politics of exclusion and oth-erness. The chronicler’s diligence makes it necessary to mention that an equally warm and friendly portraits of this Barcelonian district can be found in fiction narration of Aga Sarzyńska’s novel57.
These sections of the volume constitute a cognitively important contribu-tion concerning the heritage of the colonial past of Europe and globalizacontribu-tion challenges of the post-migration world, which still does not know if its policy is more that of walls or bridges. Migrant reality of Frontera Sur is a world woven from the relief beauty of Arab aesthetics and the dirt pushed out of the continent.
54 J. Lacan, Funkcja i pole mówienia i mowy w psychoanalizie, B. Gorczyca, W. Grajewski (tr.), Warszawa 1995.
55 Z. Bauman, Życie na przemiał, Kraków 2006. 56 G. Agamben, Homo sacer, Stansford 1998.
57 Raval, dzielnica Barcelony, to była miłość od pierwszego wejrzenia. With A. Sarzyńska
Here, Franco’s monuments have not been pulled down and people live with their colonial memories. Migrants who are fended off with barbed wire from Europe come here willingly. This reportage does not have such a powerful drama poten-tial as the panoramic Amexica. War along the Borderline by Ed Vulliamy, a British reporter of The Guardian, yet we can find here a clear correspondence to the hu-manitarian tone of the diagnosis present in European reportages58. Lipczak
pub-lished a number of reportages, articles and interviews on the topic of migrants and refugees, and here she touches upon problems which have been addressed by political scientists, sociologists, and culture researchers. In reportage details she describes a transition from “Europe of the world” to “Europe in the world”59,
in microscale diagnosing “the strange death of Europe”60 and the phenomenon of
open society which is being born in pain.
Memorization discourse
Memorization discourse of Lipczak’s book is oriented towards telling a story about the Spanish transition from dictatorship to freedom. “Co można zrobić (z) Franco w dwudziestym pierwszym wieku?” [What can be done with/to Franco in the 21st century?] is one of the titles in the book61. Memory is a collective
phenomenon62; it is construed, passed down and shared socially. It is a focus of
tradition, a tool integrating a community, legitimizing the authorities and order, creating bonds and group identities. Reportage prose of the presented authors appreciates the significance of cultural memory recorded in texts, architecture, educational institutions, museums and monuments, customs (which are all me-dia of memory). The repertoire of memory practices present in the book encom-passes, among others, rituals and family stories, studies of historical topography, participation in celebrations of local and state festivals.
58 W. Bauer, Über das Meer: mit Syrern auf der Flucht nach Europa, Berlin 2015; K. Brink-bäumer, Traum vom Leben: eine afrikanische Odyssee, Frankfurt a. M. 2011; S. Liberti, A sud di Lampedusa: cinque anni di viaggi sulle rotte dei migranti, Roma 2011; P. Kinsley, New Odyssey: the story of the twenty-first-century Europe’s refugee crisis, New York 2016.
59 W. Bereś, K. Burnetko, op. cit., p. 164.
60 D. Murray, Strange death of Europe: immigration, identity, islam, London 2017. 61 A. Lipczak, Ludzie…, op. cit., p. 163.
Described in reportage style, these phenomena can be addressed with tools developed by memory studies. It is especially useful to employ the categories of cultural and communicative memory63, functional and storage memory64 and
the theory of places of memory – les lieux de mémoire65. In this sense, Lipczak’s
reportages are narratives about the culture of memory understood as the pres-ence of the past in public space, e.g. in art, museum exhibits, language, official and confessional narratives. Memory is a process of remembering (Erinnerung), yet also denying and forgetting. Erich Maria Remarque in The Night in Lisbon wrote about dynamics of memory, which reminds one of an animal devouring its own body in order to still exist66. Lipczak describes how Spaniards do not remember,
marginalize, and taboo. Modulation of memory in society – which is recorded in Lipczak’s reportages – results from various changes: social-cultural (e.g. genera-tional), political and institutional. Understood this way, memory of the civil war and Francoist regime is nolens volens the central point describing the Spanish memorizing experience of the 20th century. “Franco is still in our heads. Ever alive, always fresh. A skeleton in the closet. A dictator in the fridge. Not buried, only cast aside”67. Lipczak’s narratives convince us that the present is uncertain in
the face of acknowledging and settling the past. American historian Timothy Sny-der wrote about the power of the “fourth dimension”: “a sense of the future has to be created in the present from what we know of the past, the fourth dimension built out from the three of daily life”68.
Lipczak’s prose tells a story about the birth of a social need for narration about the past and renegotiating memory. The author agrees with Kapuściński, who believed that modernity was a triumph of institutionalized memory, effec-tively stifling private narratives69. Yet these are private narratives that are most
significant for a reporter. Lipczak writes about the silence of school handbooks
63 J. Assmann, Cultural memory and early civilization: writing, remembrance, and political
imagination, Cambridge 2011.
64 A. Assmann, Cultural memory and western civilization: functions, media, archives, Cam-bridge 2011.
65 P. Nora, Les lieux de memoire, Paris 1997.
66 E. M., Remarque, Noc w Lizbonie, R. Wojnakowski (tr.), Warszawa 2015, p. 125–126. 67 A. Lipczak, Ludzie…, op. cit., p. 139.
68 T. Snyder Timothy, Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning, eBook 2015, p. 343.
and encyclopaedias, about the burden of fear (there is a poignant reportage about a man who did not leave his home in fear of the dictatorship); records the difficult process of unblocking memory of witnesses (a reportage about looking for the graves of “disappeared” people (desaparecido) from the time of the civil war), she also writes about diversification of ideas about places of memory. These sections of the volume are very interesting for the Polish reader as they point to some correspondence to Polish memorization experience of the 20th century70. Polish
white spots on the map of the national memory – still controversial and deform-edly conceptualized – refer, for instance, to witnessing the holocaust of Polish Jews during German occupation, moral responsibility for being engaged in the commu-nist system, for victims of Stalicommu-nist repressions and the Martial Law of 1981. “To Europe, but with your sloppily buried dead”71, the author writes, paraphrasing
the tile of Maria Janion’s book (Do Europy tak, ale z naszymi umarłymi [To Europe, but with our dead], 2017). The Polish literary scholar wrote a book about the con-sequences of the end of Romantic-symbolic culture and about changes in perceiv-ing and rememberperceiv-ing the cultural heritage of the past – also the most gloomy, shameful and evil past (with reflection on antisemitism as a main motif). Refer-ring to Janion, Lipczak proposes a group therapy to Spaniards. Working through the past – bidding a dignified farewell to the ancestors and carefully listening to their heritage – is a condition that must be fulfilled in order to determine ethi-cal perspectives of the future.
Aleksandra Lipczak looks underneath “the lining of the world”72. Under
the layer of Baedeker rhetoric made up to cater to tourists who consume Spain, she found a picture of a European country abundant in dramas and mysteries, intriguing narratives and unique characters. She described a country facing its past, yet boldly creating the vision of its future. It is a pity that the author so spar-ingly used the literary style when it comes to language, portrayal of the characters and compositional plan. Her journalistic temper effectively stifled her literary predilections.
70 L. Nijakowski, Polska polityka pamięci. Esej socjologiczny, Warszawa 2008. 71 A. Lipczak, Ludzie…, op. cit., p. 161.
72 J. Alvaro J., Książka Ludzie z Placu Słońca. Recenzja i wywiad z autorką, 2017, https:// hispanico.pl/ksiazka-ludzie-z-placu-slonca/ (access: 09.03.2020).
Off the beaten track of the present, that is a guide to event culture: Katarzyna Kobylarczyk
While Aleksandra Lipczak admired Spanish modernizing undertakings, Katarzyna Kobylarczyk asked about the meaning of cultural heritage of local communities. Lipczak rationally analyzed facts, Kobylarczyk collected impressions and emo-tions, juxtaposed the logic of facts with the non-physical, non-literal. She opened up to the invisible, non-obvious, spiritual. Lipczak’s texts are reportages focused on problems which very rarely reached out for the literary style. Kobylarczyk cre-ated reportages-essays, reportages-impressions, reportages-miniatures written with sensual language and elaborative metaphors. The style of her narratives re-minds one of elegant and erudite phrases of travel essays of Maria Kuncewiczowa (1990), already mentioned above. The latter’s grand tour was reminiscent of the best patterns of the literature of the previous century. It was compiled from re-portage detail, nuggets recorded in memory, emotions pursuant to experiencing great texts of culture, written with the awareness of metaphorical senses. “Eve-rything a foreigner’s eyes see casts a shadow, grows into a metaphor, while the sense of things and events flees like a scent”73 – this is what Kuncewiczowa said
and what Kobylarczyk could repeat. The author created a beautiful narrative, per-vaded with internal rhythms and tensions, once closer to the boredom of a walk in heavy heat, once dynamic like a telegram.
Pył z landrynek originated from a blog (http://septimo-piso.blogspot.com),
yet texts it comprises are not mere reprints. The first-person figure of the nar-rator is shaped on the basis of a habitus of a journalist correspondent who em-braces a duty to penetrate various spheres of reality and relate facts to the read-er. “Your correspondent” – this is how, suspiciously seriously, the narrator calls themselves, describing preparations to the journey as if they were readying them-selves to participate in a dangerous war mission (equipment, research, planning). Obviously, this is an intellectual joke, an intelligent parody of the ethos of war journalist, who is today focused not on information but rather on live coverage74.
Kobylarczyk’s undertaking is ambitious in its conceptual layer: it is a subjective description of the most fascinating Spanish fiestas. Although it is not
73 M. Kuncewiczowa, op. cit., p. 123.
a precedent in the Polish 21st-century reportage75, this undertaking is especially
great in its scope and rich in sources. The book remains underappreciated. It was accused of being kaleidoscopic and superficial, written in exalted language76 and
limited to passive observation of cultural phenomena.
Kobylarczyk’s journey is part of an infectious trance resulting from getting excited with the show and participation. This is an attempt of documenting various Span-ish fiestas and watching people who, on the one hand, celebrate a festival as an ele-ment of the old tradition; on the other hand, noticing progressing commercializa-tion and gradual transformacommercializa-tion of street celebracommercializa-tions into mindlessly ticked tourist attraction77.
Very rarely was the author praised for her erudition, thorough subject-mat-ter preparation, colorful language78. Only one review emphasized what actually is
the greatest asset of the volume: looking for metaphysics in the secularized world.
For Katarzyna Kobylarczyk, a Spanish fiesta is one of a kind anthropological and historical phenomenon, connecting generation after generation in an unbreakable chain of culturally-rich tradition. It has different faces, being an indispensable ele-ment of the identity of citizens of particular villages, cities and regions. Everyone, independently of being a native or a tourist passing by, can read in the fiesta one common message: stop and celebrate. Do not rush. Time is not going to run out79.
Mircea Eliade believed that being exposed to sacrum and myth is fundamen-tal human experience thanks to which man gets acquainted with non-historical sacral reality and escapes the power of chaos80. Sacrum builds the sense of the
75 M. Bernatowicz, Hiszpania. Fiesta dobra na wszystko, Warszawa 2017; M. L. Graff,
Spo-kojnie, to tylko Hiszpania. Przewodnik po różnicach kulturowych, J. Zabrodzka, P. Wciślik (tr.), Warszawa 2007.
76 J. Marchwica, Recenzja Pył z landrynek, 2017, http://etnosystem.pl/ksiazka/recen-zje/7194-kobylarczyk-pyl-z-landrynek (access: 10.03.2020).
77 B. Darska, Recenzja Pył z landrynek. Hiszpańskie fiesty, 2017, https://kultura.onet.pl/ recenzje/recenzja-pyl-z-landrynek-hiszpanskie-fiesty-katarzyna-kobylarczyk/sgzn0f8 (ac-cess: 02.03.2020).
78 Morgause, Pył z landrynek. Hiszpańskie fiesty, 2015, https://www.biblionetka.pl/art. aspx?id=939259 (access: 07.03.2020).
79 J. Kapica-Curzyste, Fiesta forever, 2013, https://esensja.pl/ksiazka/recenzje/tekst. html?id=16522) (access: 05.02.2020).
world, allows one to recognize values, organizes space and time. Fiestas con-stitute the time of sacrum as an interval of daily life. They materialize mythical events which worked “at the beginning,” with their cyclic nature document the lasting existence of the world. In the modern laicized times, sacrum does not have to have a religious context, it may denote a ritual which centers around itself a particular community, stopping the reality. Fiesta is nowadays a field of interdis-ciplinary research within social and humanist studies. An anthropological anal-ysis of fiestas’ ontology shows that through cyclic updating of particular rituals and ceremonies, it is an important manifestation of local identity and cultural dis-tinctiveness of a given community81. Its meaning is historical, cultural, religious,
folklore and social. It constitutes a microcosmos with its own language, aesthet-ics, hierarchy, and axionormative system.
It is this functional multifaceted nature of fiestas, the complicated nature of social rituals and behaviors and manifestations of sacrum that interests Katarzyna Kobylarczyk. The author complements her reportage participatory observation with thorough knowledge on history, anthropology, ethnography. As a result, she creates engaging minitreatise about patrons of festivals, local heroes and myths, about intermingling of modern religious practices and pagan rituals. Kobylarczyk asks about the position of fiestas in the times of posttourism and in relation to the paradigm of entertainment, emotion, education, engage82. She realizes that the
watched spectacles have been commercialized, she knows how ambivalent the impact of tourist industry on local communities is. In her attitude towards the world there is no naivety of “postmodern tourists,” who look for “authenticity”83.
Yet Kobylarczyk’s narrative confirms that event tourism has not destroyed the au-thentic character of Spanish fiestas84.
81 S. R. Becerra, Religión y fiesta. Antropología de las creencias y rituales de Andalucía, Se-villa 2000.
82 A. Wieczorkiewicz, Apetyt turysty. O doświadczaniu świata w podróży, Kraków 2008, p. 235.
83 D. MacCanell, Tourist: a new theory of the leisure class, New York 1989.
84 E. Malchrowicz-Mośko, K. Buczkowska, Fiesty hiszpańskie – jeszcze święta lokalne, czy
już tylko atrakcje dla turystów?, „Turystyka Kulturowa” 2010 / 4, p. 17–37; K. Buczkowska, E. Malchrowicz, Współczesne znaczenie hiszpańskich fiest religijnych w opinii młodych polskich turystów i mieszkańców Hiszpanii, „Szczecińskie Zeszyty Naukowe. Turystyka religijna zagad-nienia interdyscyplinarne” nr 647 (2011), p. 111–125.
Katarzyna Kobylarczyk’s event guidebook is deceitful.
Again, we deal here with a genre alteration, with
staffage. Pył z landrynek is a metaguidebook.
A guidebook offers a readable and reasonable itinerary,
Kobylarczyk proposes an accidental and rather chaotic
hike. A guidebook is based on solid facts, Kobylarczyk
trusts impressions and intuitions. Her narrative is
governed not by graphs and maps but by the figure of
labyrinth. The archetypal significance of labyrinth points
to a way to a spiritual center, to self-cognition
85. The
labyrinth symbolizes a mystery, chaos, mess, but also
infinity, complications and a trap. The figure of labyrinth
is present in the urban plan of Spanish villages and
cities, in incomprehensible structures of behaviors of
celebrations’ participants, in the mystery of symbols and
rituals; and this figure makes it impossible to recognize
the sense of the witnessed events
86.
The experience of hierophany87 is not available for people who are not
com-munity members, but nosy onlookers, “We cannot interfere into something which is not ours, which we do not understand, and which we could – perhaps – des-ecrate with our barbarity”88 – the author claims. The limited epistemological
com-petences of the subject are symbolized also by the figure of moth, fog, darkness, and a recurrent motif of a lost wanderer. Signposts mislead, maps confuse, ahay-wire clock’s hands lie, memory fails. We deal here with the empirical “getting lost with a guidebook,” whose various variants were described by Magdalena Barba-ruk, concerned with literary routes of La Mancha89.
85 Y.-T. Tuan, Space and place: the perspective of experience, Minneapolis 1977. 86 W. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Frankfurt am Main 2009.
87 M. Eliade, The quest: history and meaning in religion, Chicago 1971. 88 K. Kobylarczyk, Pył z landrynek. Hiszpańskie fiesty, Wołowiec 2013, p. 53.
89 M. Barbaruk, Przewodniki błądzenia, „Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis”, no 3649, „Prace Kulturoznawcze” nr XVII (2015), p. 171–181; idem, Sensy błądzenia. La Mancha i jej peryferie, Kraków 2018.
Watching fiestas was reminiscent of watching someone’s dreams while being awake. At night, strange cities became entangled labyrinths, nameless people got caught in the whirl of not entirely comprehensible ceremonies and among the tight crowd of their bodies we – lonely newcomers – could flit by the walls completely unpunished and unnoticed. It was easy to get addicted to this90.
The scary vastness of the interior is governed by indeterminacy and lack of closure. Timeframes crumble, space structures collapse. “Time changes into a whirl, or maybe it stops completely, it might have never flown here, in this stony town, entangled in wires, in this great country on the margin of the present”91.
The reportage reality brings to life characters from a few ages ago, imagination creates figures of mythical heroes.
It seemed that all citizens escaped or hid – as if from the side of golf pitches, through unguarded gates, almagavars were to come, this motley crew of outcasts, runaways, bandits under the banners of cross and crescent, who were employed by the Crown of Aragon, these wild children of deserted Spanish desolations, who have never shaved and had their hair cut, called from Arabic muhavir – “companion,” mghab-bar – “dusted,” and maybe simply from mughaver – “foray”92.
These formal solutions illustrate transformations of the modern reportage described by Mateusz Zimoch, which he names a transition from the rationalist to the empirical perspective93. We all know the discomfort of Kapuściński, who
a few decades ago wrote about the figure of translator hovering between cultures, trying to comprehend cultural codes alien to him and explain to the reader the hidden sense of described phenomena. Kobylarczyk does not have such limita-tions, the rationalist perspective – integrating, explaining the sense of textualized reality – gives way to the category of experience: individual, always unique, never attempting to generalize.
90 K. Kobylarczyk, op. cit., p. 10. 91 Ibid, p. 23–24.
92 Ibid, p. 24.
93 M. Zimnoch, Współczesny reportaż między racjonalizmem a doświadczeniem. Rozprawa doktorska napisana pod kierunkiem prof. dra hab. Kazimierza Wolnego-Zmorzyńskiego, Uni-wersytet Warszawski, Warszawa 2014, p. 116, https://depotuw.ceon.pl/bitstream/handle/ item/1060/Mateusz Zimnoch, Współczesny reportaż (access: 02.03.2020).
The time of myth that Kobylarczyk engenders on the pages of her reportage encompasses extreme natural phenomena (wind, thunder, lightning). The miracle is juxtaposed with ordinariness, the banal with sanctity, the sin with atonement, joy with suffering. Kobylarczyk implicitly asks about the spirituality of our times, about the sense the modern posttourist will attribute to the encounter with the poeticity of miracle, with the mysticism of ceremonies, with visualizations of uni-versal anthrotopoi of good and evil. Pył z landrynek is a wise and beautiful story about life and passing, longing for the order in the world, and universal values. This is “the lost Spain” which was the focus of Norman Lewis’ words, this is the “the lost time” he was searching for.
Practising Polishness: Ewa Wysocka
It is difficult to attribute a particular genre to the book written by Ewa Wysocka, a long-time correspondent of Polish Radio in Spain. Its polymorphic form com-bines together elements of reportage, essay, column and guidebook. Wysocka cre-ated a narrative which is pretextual and fragmentary. The idea organizing its cog-nitive layer consists in Polish tropes in the cultural landscape of Barcelona. This selection originally profiles the area of peregrinations and nolens volens com-municates lack of aspirations to create an exhaustive story about Barcelona. The author identifies elements in the city cultural landscape which connect it with Poland, at the same time writing a fascinating script for practicing Polishness in Barcelona. The memory map which Wysocka sketches features the most obvious places, but they are filled with the signs of Polish cultural heritage. La Rambla is mentioned because of Fryderyk Chopin, who spent a week in Barcelona in 1839. The port brings up Gombrowicz, coming back from Argentina in 1963. El Raval reminds one of Ryszard Kapuściński, who was fascinated by it; Camp Nou means a story of a Polish emigrant who played in a football team in 1911 and John Paul II addressing the crowds in Catalan. Defined so, the memory map encompasses places which are peripheral when compared with standardized tourist routes (e.g. a wayside shrine of the Mother of God of Częstochowa). Important points include spaces where artistic projects of Polish artists took place (a graphic art-ist Jurek Janiszewski, directors: Tadeusz Kantor, Krystian Lupa), as well as places where Polish literature was promoted (Sant Jordi Festival).
This narrative speaks through grand buildings and addresses, commemo-rative tablets, cafes and photographs, as well as sounds. This is confirmed in
a gripping story of Lluís Llach and the Catalan sources of a cult song of Solidarity performed by Jacek Kaczmarski. “Polish narratives” of the city memory do not go beyond the frames of a Baedeker sketch and are not bound by a dramatic compo-sition line. This silvarerum is rather a collection of curiosities, peculiarities. Pre-textuality of the narration is one of its most important features. Polish episodes in the city life become points of reference to characterize the cultural specificity of the city. The impression about the Spanish reception of Sławomir Mrożek is a pre-text to introduce a digression on censorship concerning morality in the times of General Franco; many-hours-long performances directed by Krystian Lupa lead to passages on eating habits of Catalans. Wysocka wants to talk about connec-tions and differences of both cultures, and to look for historical episodes of mu-tual fascinations. This aspect of the cognitive layer is especially attractive for the Polish reader who is unaware of the Catalan reception of Polish history. Wysocka writes about Catalans’ admiration for the determination of the Polish nation, who in the 18th century was deprived of their country, about respect for the heroic deeds of the Polish soldier, about a lesson which can be learned from the experi-ence of Polish political arguments.
…for some reason we hung an invisible bridge over the Old Europe (…). The con-struction was supported by Spaniards, praising participants of the January Uprising of 1863, crying over their fate, and then warning that their own country would share the same fate if it did not come to its senses and stop internal arguments. It is rare for those who are oppressors – and this was the case of the Poles blindly following Napoleon on his European crusade – to have been surrounded with warm feelings94.
Another element of Polish-Spanish connections, equally unobvious for the Polish reader, concerns the analogy of Polish and Spanish experience in the course of history. Wysocka accentuates analogies of enslavement of Franco’s dic-tatorship and the communist regime in the post-Yalta Poland. According to the author, similarities can be traced in the aesthetics of everyday life, in the authori-ties’ aspirations to control the citizen, and even in the mentality of an individ-ual. Wysocka’s volume encompasses interesting sketches on media program-ming in Catalonia – TV programmes Polonia and Cracovia. The first of the proper names, strongly rooted in the linguistic usage, reproduces a catalogue of ethnic
hereosterotypes. The Spanish word polacos is used to patronise Catalans, whose compatriots believe them to speak a strange unintelligible language. The satiri-cal character of the programme brings to the foreground discursive potential of this narrative. Thanks to Wysocka’s book, the reader can follow Poles in Barce-lona, empirically verifying views on the (lack of) knowledge of Poles and Catalans about each other. This book – decidedly the weakest among the three presented ones when it comes to its author’s writing skills, less impressive as a project, less documented – can be exonerated because of the originality of its concept. Pol-ish Barcelona is a topic still new for Poles, a topic which remains important and attractive.
CONCLUSIONS
Assmann’s theory of cultural memory assumes that every text of culture can be a reservoir of memory, a distributor of memory and a creator of the content of memory. The three non-fiction Polish texts presented here and focused on de-scribing current and a bit more distant Spanish experiences constitute Baedekers of sorts, guiding the reader around the world of ideas, values and transformations of the modern Europe. This is Europe which is getting smaller, facing serious chal-lenges of globalization, the migration crisis, still unprepared to lose its hegem-onic position in the world. Reportage – a medium which is important socially and culturally – is a specially competent formula when it comes to listening to the rhythm of reality, portraying the world and its actors. It can be “a mirror being carried alonga road” (Stendhal), sometimes a seismograph of important social, cultural and political changes. The three chosen strategies of conceptualizing the reportage image of Spain are but a small prolegomenon to delineating the sym-bolic imaginarium of Spain from the Polish perspective at the dawn of a new mil-lennium. It is an image interesting for the Polish reader because Spain is a country increasingly often visited by Poles, who come here as tourists, but also pilgrims, students, gastarbeiters, investors, intellectuals promoting their artistic oeuvre in Europe. What is captivating are the symmetries in the history of both countries observed in the reportages. On the other hand, what proves important is touch-ing the priceless civilizational heritage of Spain, a dowry which has significantly determined the character of European transformation today and in the coming decades. Painted by Polish reporters, this image of Spain tells a story about the
challenges of globalization and relationships of citizens and their state, it talks about the imperative to work through controversial episodes from the past and difficulties to find the right language to describe them, it conjures up the space of sacrum and convinces one that in the unstablepost-industrial world there are strong foundations of values and norms. These are subsequent chapters of per-egrinations on the routes of cultural heritage of the Iberian Peninsula, back in the day perpetuated by Ernest Hemingway and Miguel de Unamuno in writing, by Francisco Goya and Pablo Picasso in painting, and by Luis Buñuel in montage.
Research sample
Title Ludzie z Placu Słońca Pył z landrynek.
Hiszpańskie fiesty Barcelona stolica Polski
Author Aleksandra Lipczak Katarzyna Kobylarczyk Ewa Wysocka
Publishing date 2017 2013 2016
Publishing house Dowody na Istnienie Wydawnictwo Czarne Marginesy
Publishment place Warsaw Wołowiec Warsaw
Volume 254 p. 157 p. 227 p.
Genre Reportage Reportage Reportage
Criteria of choosing the texts’ corps Inspiration and the method of realizing and communi-cating the journey
cultural journey as a workshop and cognitive experience of non-fiction literature
Theme and problems Original elements of Spain’s symbolic image
Genology Genre variants of a Polish contemporary reportage
Analysis’ categories: theme and morphological perspective Ludzie z Placu Słońca Pył z landrynek.
Hiszpańskie fiesty Barcelona stolica Polski theme Challenges of the societies
being globalized; laborato-ry of European migration experiences; memory of imperial past; discourse of gender; anti-system move-ment; modernization
Poetry and pragmatics of Spanish fiestas; fiesta as a historical, cultural, reli-gious, folklore and social experience; searching for metaphysics in a secu-larized world; symbol-ism of rituals and social behaviours
Polish tracks in a cultural landscape of Barcelona; scenario of practicing Polishness in Barcelona
